Obama Calls World ‘Safer’ After Pakistan Raid

President Obama said at the Medal of Honor ceremony on Monday that the world was a safer place without Osama bin Laden.Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Calling it a “good day for America,” President Obama said on Monday that the death of Osama bin Laden had made the world “a better place,” as new details emerged about the overnight raid and firefight in Pakistan that killed him.

“The world is safer,” Mr. Obama said as he appeared at a White House ceremony bestowing the Medal of Honor to two soldiers killed in the Korean War. “It is a better place because of the death of Osama bin Laden.”

Bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda and the most hunted man in the world, was found not in the remote tribal areas along the Pakistani-Afghan border where he has long been presumed to be sheltered, but in a large compound in the city of Abbottabad, about an hour’s drive north from the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.

The compound, only about a third of a mile from a military academy of the Pakistani Army, is at the end of a narrow dirt road and is roughly eight times the size of other homes in the area. It has no telephone or Internet connections. When American operatives converged on the residence early on Monday morning, Bin Laden “resisted the assault force” and was shot in the head and killed near the end of an intense 40-minute gun battle, senior administration officials said.

The raid carried extraordinary risks — and not just from Bin Laden and those with him in the compound. As the sound of battle shook the night, Pakistan scrambled jets to respond to a military operation that its military had not been informed was taking place.

“They had no idea about who might have been on there, whether it be U.S. or somebody else,” John O. Brennan, President Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, said in a briefing on Monday. “So we were watching and making sure that our people and our aircraft were able to get out of the Pakistani airspace, and thankfully there was no engagement with Pakistani forces.”

Mr. Obama and his national security advisers gathered in the White House to follow the raid, which had been planned and carried out in extreme secrecy. “It was probably one of the most anxiety-filled periods of time, I think, in the lives of the people who were assembled here yesterday,” Mr. Brennan said. “The minutes passed like days.”

The tensest moment for those watching, he said, came when one of two helicopters that flew the American troops into the compound broke down, stalling as it flew over the 18-foot wall of the compound and prepared to land. After the raid, the team blew up the helicopter and called in one of two backups. In all, 79 commandos and a dog were involved.

President Obama considered other options that would have been less risky, like an airstrike, but ultimately opted to send in commandos because, Mr. Brennan said, “it gave us the ability to minimize collateral damage” and “to ensure that we knew who it was that was on that compound.”

Even a day later, not all of the details of the operation were known; some may never be. Officials did say that Bin Laden resisted arrest, but it was not clear, Mr. Brennan said, whether he opened fire himself.

One of Bin Laden’s wives, who was living in the compound with him, identified his body after the fighting stopped, and officials said the Central Intelligence Agency analysis found a “virtually 100 percent” match between his DNA and that of several members of his family.

The whereabouts of Ayman al-Zawahri, Al Qaeda’s second-in-command, were unclear.

The administration disclosed that military and intelligence officials first learned last summer that a “high-value target” was being protected in the compound, and they began working on a plan for going in to get him. Beginning in March, Mr. Obama presided over five national security meetings at the White House to review plans for the operation. On Friday morning, just before leaving Washington to tour tornado damage in Alabama, Mr.. Obama gave the final order for members of the Navy Seals and C.I.A. operatives to strike.

Three men besides Bin Laden were killed during the 40-minute raid, one believed to be his son and the other two his couriers, according to an American official who briefed reporters under White House ground rules forbidding further identification. A woman was killed while shielding Bin Laden — Mr. Brennan said she was Bin Laden’s wife, but other officials suggested that she was not — and two other people were wounded.

“No Americans were harmed,” Mr. Obama said in a late-night televised statement, adding that the American operatives “took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.”

Muslim tradition requires prompt burial, generally within 24 hours, but American authorities found a way to comply with that requirement while denying his followers a shrine. His body was washed in accordance with Islamic custom, and placed in a white sheet and then inside a weighted bag, a senior defense official said. Aboard the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson in the North Arabian Sea, a military officer read religious rites — translated into Arabic — and then the body was placed on a board, tipped up and “eased into the sea,” the official said. Mr. Brennan said the raid was intended to capture Bin Laden, though those who planned it assumed that he would resist. “If we had the opportunity to take him alive, we would have done that,” he said. The killing ended any hope of prosecution.

American intelligence officials said that the team removed a large trove of documents and materials from the residence, and that the C.I.A. was just beginning to go through it.

The reaction in Washington the day after was ebullient. Mr. Obama recalled the sense of unity and purpose that immediately followed the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon nearly a decade ago. “Today we are reminded that as a nation there’s nothing we can’t do when we put our shoulders to the wheel, when we remember the sense of unity that defines us as Americans,” he said.

There were words of caution, too. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton praised Pakistan for its cooperation in fighting Al Qaeda, even as some analysts and officials voiced disbelief that Bin Laden could have lived where he did without the knowledge of Pakistani officials.

“Continued cooperation will be just as important in the days ahead,” she said, “because even as we mark this milestone, we should not forget that the battle to stop Al Qaeda and its syndicate of terror will not end with the death of Bin Laden.”

The raid, months in the planning, came after intelligence officials learned the identity of one of Bin Laden’s couriers and traced him to the hideout.

Last night, an official said that “detainees” had identified a few years ago the nickname of one courier who “in particular had our constant attention.” He described the courier as, among other things, a “trusted assistant” of Abu Faraj al-Libbi, who was the No. 3 figure in Al Qaeda until his capture in 2005. Officials later learned the real name for that courier, which in turn eventually allowed them to trace him to the compound in Abbottabad.

One of the Guantánamo detainee-assessment files disclosed recently to WikiLeaks and obtained independently by The New York Times may provide a clue about the origins of the intelligence that led to the breakthrough.

That document, an assessment of Mr. Libbi, who was transferred from a secret C.I.A. prison to Guantánamo Bay in September 2006, discusses his interactions with a courier for Bin Laden — who is identified in the document by the initials UBL — in Pakistan. Footnotes to those sentences cite what appear to be C.I.A. accounts of interrogations of Mr. Libbi in 2005 and 2006.

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“In July 2003, detainee received a letter from UBL’s designated courier, Maulawi Abd al-Khaliq Jan, requesting detainee take on the responsibility of collecting donations, organizing travel, and distributing funds to families in Pakistan,” the assessment says. “UBL stated detainee would be the official messenger between UBL and others in Pakistan.”

The file then immediately connects Mr. Libbi’s activities at that time to Abbottabad, stating, “In mid-2003, detainee moved his family to Abbottabad, PK and worked between Abbottabad and Peshawar.”

A footnote to that section also includes an analyst’s note saying that in May 2005 Mr. Libbi stated that “he was responsible for facilitation within the settled areas of Pakistan, communication with UBL and external links.”

“He was responsible for communicating with al-Qaida members abroad and obtaining funds and personnel from those Al Qaeda members.”

Bin Laden’s demise is a defining moment in the American-led fight against terrorism, a symbolic stroke affirming the relentlessness of the pursuit of those who attacked New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001. What remains to be seen, however, is whether it galvanizes Bin Laden’s followers by turning him into a martyr or serves as a turning of the page in the war in Afghanistan and gives further impetus to Mr. Obama to bring American troops home.

How much his death will affect Al Qaeda itself remains unclear. For years, as they failed to find him, American leaders said he was more important symbolically than operationally, because he was on the run and hindered in any meaningful leadership role. Yet he remained the most potent face of terrorism around the world, and some of those who played down his role in recent years nonetheless celebrated his death.

Given Bin Laden’s status among radicals, the American government braced for possible retaliation. A senior Pentagon official said late Sunday that military bases in the United States and around the world were ordered to a higher state of readiness. The State Department issued a worldwide travel warning, urging Americans in volatile areas “to limit their travel outside of their homes and hotels and avoid mass gatherings and demonstrations.”

The strike could deepen tensions with Pakistan, which has periodically bristled at American counterterrorism efforts even as Bin Laden evidently found safe refuge on its territory for nearly a decade. Since taking office, Mr. Obama has ordered significantly more drone strikes on suspected terrorist targets in Pakistan, stirring public anger there and prompting the Pakistani government to protest.

Mr. Brennan, like Mrs. Clinton, defended Pakistan, even as he acknowledged the tensions between the two countries over fighting terrorism. “We’ve had differences of view with the Pakistani government on counterterrorism cooperation and areas of cooperation and what we think they should and shouldn’t be doing,” he said. “At the same time, I’ll say that Pakistan has been responsible for capturing and killing more terrorists inside of Pakistan than any country, and it’s by a wide margin.”

Bin Laden’s death came nearly 10 years after Qaeda terrorists hijacked four American passenger jets, crashing two of them into the World Trade Center in New York and a third into the Pentagon outside Washington. The fourth hijacked jet, carrying United Flight 93, crashed into the Pennsylvania countryside after passengers fought the militants.

“This is important news for us, and for the world,” said Gordon Felt, president of the group Families of Flight 93. “It cannot ease our pain, or bring back our loved ones. It does bring a measure of comfort that the mastermind of the Sept. 11 tragedy and the face of global terror can no longer spread his evil.”

The mostly young people who celebrated in the streets of New York and Washington saw it as a historic moment, one that for many of them culminated a worldwide manhunt that started when they were children. Some climbed trees and lampposts directly in front of the White House to cheer and wave flags. Cigars and noisemakers were common. One group started singing, “Osama, Osama, hey, hey, hey, goodbye.”

Maureen Hasson, 22, a recent college graduate working for the Justice Department, came down to Lafayette Square in a fuchsia party dress and flip-flops. “This is full circle for our generation,” she said. “Just look around at the average age here. We were all in middle school when the terrorists struck. We all vividly remember 9/11, and this is the close of that chapter.”

The city of Abbottabad where Bin Laden was found has had other known Al Qaeda members in the past. A senior Indonesian militant, Umar Patek, was arrested there earlier this year. Mr. Patek was protected by a Qaeda operative, a clerk who worked undercover at the main post office, a signal that Al Qaeda may have had other operations in the area.

The Pakistani military cordoned off the roads and alleys leading to the compound on Monday. But residents of the middle-class area who were reached by phone said they had not been suspicious about the residents of the house, despite its size and the fact that very few people ever seemed to leave the compound.

Analysts said Bin Laden’s death amounted to a double blow for Al Qaeda, after its sermons of anti-Western violence seemed to be rendered irrelevant by the wave of political upheaval rolling through the Arab world.

“It comes at a time when Al Qaeda’s narrative is already very much in doubt in the Arab world,” said Martin S. Indyk, vice president and director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. “Its narrative was that violence was the way to redeem Arab honor and dignity. But Osama bin Laden and his violence didn’t succeed in unseating anybody.”

Al Qaeda sympathizers reacted with disbelief, anger and in some cases talk of retribution. On a Web site considered an outlet for Qaeda messages, forum administrators deleted posts by users announcing Bin Laden’s death and demanded that members wait until the news was confirmed by Qaeda sources, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, an organization that monitors radicals.

Even so, SITE said, sympathizers on the forum posted messages calling Bin Laden a martyr and suggesting retaliation. “America will reap the same if the news is true and false,” said one message. “The lions will remain lions and will continue moving in the footsteps of Usama,” said another, using an alternate spelling of Bin Laden’s name. Osama is Arabic for “young lion.”

In the United States, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an advocacy organization, said it welcomed Bin Laden’s death. “As we have stated repeatedly since the 9/11 terror attacks, Bin Laden never represented Muslims or Islam,” the group said in a statement. “In fact, in addition to the killing of thousands of Americans, he and Al Qaeda caused the deaths of countless Muslims worldwide.”

The president stressed that the United States was not at war with Islam. “Bin Laden was not a Muslim leader; he was a mass murderer of Muslims,” Mr. Obama said. “Indeed, Al Qaeda has slaughtered scores of Muslims in many countries, including our own. So his demise should be welcomed by all who believe in peace and human dignity.”